Rolling the R's A novel by R. Zamora Linmark Now in paperback!! Book Description . About the Author . Excerpt . Reviews . Events . Buy Books Now The setting is Hawaii, the time is the '70s, the friends are all in fifth grade. Told alternately in first and third person, in fantasies, monologues, poems, report cards, and a chain letter, Rolling the Rs shows Edgardo and his friends alive in a world where Donna Summer saves your life by releasing a new album. And then you risk that life by imitating her on top of the wall around your yard in front of your neighbors, in front of the boy you want, and in front of your father, who comes home to take away all your copies of Song Hits-and to knock you down. Edgardo and his friends are boys with hard-ons for men, and the seam of this narrative is desire, binding together the life of adults and the life of children in Edgardo's Hawaiian neighborhood. Rolling is a collection of related stories that seems a lovely child born from the same womb as the work of Sandra Cisneros. Linmark has Cisneros's ear for language, making prosody out of "pidgin" English. Like Cisneros, Linmark takes the language of his home and makes from it landscapes of both sound and meaning. When Linmark says, "P.P.S. Katrina you ready for be one sixth grade mother...", it is a line of smooth rhythm that is exactly what it is supposed to be: English broken to fit around a world that only half-wants to speak it. The structure of this narrative crafted from stories is of a piece with the distinctive structure of Linmark's sentences. If the English is broken, so is this story collection, to make room for the telling of the lives at the center of this book. - excerpted from A. Magazine Linmark's Rolling the R's is a funky hothouse treat, with unforgettable characters like Edgar Ramirez and his pals Katrina Trina, Vicente and MaiLan. With refreshing candor and sly wit, Linmark explores both taboo sexuality and ethnic identity. [Linmark is] remarkably in tune with the way their adolescent characters dream and speak, with the up-and-down chaos of their daily lives. - Jessica Hagedorn Rolling the R's explores the struggles...to form sexual and ethnic identities at the fringes of mainstream American culture in '70s Honolulu. [B]e prepared for an unflinching look at growing up colored and queer. The novel manages to be comic and tragic at the same time, and its language and situations are deadly accurate. - Honolulu Star Bulletin The Honolulu-based writer explores the unsettling and often screamingly funny, multi-racial immigrant world of hormonally-charged teenagers in the predominantly Filipino neighborhood of Kahili. These second-generation youngsters seem to have a shrewder idea than their parents that the American ideal isn't what it is supposed to be. Set far from the postcard-pretty haunts of Diamond Head, among drug abusers, domestic violence and gangs, the novel effectively uses pidgin English and street language. Linmark relies on sharply etched, satirical vignettes to detail the bitter effects of racism, alienation and dispossession. - Asiaweek